BENGALURU: Twitter, Pinterest and other Silicon Valley tech giants are setting goals to recruit more women, emerging from a strengthening movement that’s pushing the industry to improve its abysmal diversity quotient.

In India, while there is some progress towards addressing the need for more women entrepreneurs, the lack of women in tech roles at domestic startups is glaring. No specific targets are being set yet. ET reached out to India’s 10 most highly valued startups for details on female participation in their tech and nontech teams and the results were, expectedly, skewed.

Women comprise 15 per cent of In-Mobi’s tech workforce, while at Paytm, 20 per cent of the team is women. Flipkart, Freshdesk, Practo, Quikr and Snapdeal declined to share numbers, while requests to Mu Sigma and Ola went unanswered.

In comparison, Twitter’s publicly announced goal is to increase the number of women in its overall workforce from 34 per cent to 35 per cent, and in its tech division from 13 per cent to 16 per cent. The microblogging platform made the announcement following a backlash against a recent party for its employees that underscored its male-dominant culture.

The arguments in favour of gender diversity aren’t just about providing equal opportunities, but as much about the need to capitalise on the huge operational and business potential.

“(Inclusion) enables companies to solve complex problems and innovate more effectively, which is particularly beneficial for startups, who differentiate themselves through innovation,” said Natalie Johnson, partner at Paradigm, a Silicon Valley-based agency working with highly-valued startups such as Airbnb and Pinterest on their diversity initiatives. It’s not that startups do not recognise this.

At Gurgaon-based Zomato, gender ratios in the finance and tech teams were “very lopsided”, said Cofounder and Chief Executive Deepinder Goyal. “Upon taking a closer look at it, one realises that, unfortunately, there aren’t enough women across positions in the finance and, more so, tech industry. At the top, at the bottom and in the middle, there aren’t enough women to hire,” Goyal said. He, however, said half of all senior management roles at Zomato were held by women.

Aradhana Vaidya, a 3D artist who has worked at companies such as Intel and Dreamworks, said it was important for women to prepare for technology roles right from school. As several sectors undergo technology transformations, knowing the nitty-gritties of coding helps improve a product, said Vaidya, who began her career as an architect but has embraced coding for her role as a customer success engineer at 3D design software maker Autodesk.

Indeed, promoting gender diversity in the workforce starts early, said Johnson of Paradigm. “A key way tech companies can promote gender diversity is by mitigating bias in how they attract, recruit, manage, and retain talent,” she said.

“Raising individual awareness of bias and implementing structures to reduce bias can enhance efforts to hire a diverse workforce.” Some startups have initiated measures to achieve this. At InMobi, all recruitment managers are women. The company is also set to establish HackerSchool, a monthlong scholarship and sponsorship programme for women software engineers who will be taught by In-Mobi engineers.

However, “startups don’t lose their sleep over their gender diversity ratio. It’s not their number priority,” said Geeta Kannan, managing director India of Anita Borg Institute, a non-profit advocating the need for more women in the tech industry. “But they should, because their business depends on it.”

“For startups, the need of the hour is talent, not gender or any other aspect,” said Shachi Irde, executive director of Catalyst India, an organisation advocating more roles for women in business. The diversity agenda is a smaller subset of a more important talent program for startups, she said.

But to attract talent, startups should introspect whether half the population will prefer the fastpaced work environments that these firms thrive in, said Kannan of Anita Borg Institute.

To correct this, she said it was important for startups to draft policies like work-from-home arrangements and flexible hours. Change on this front will take time as well as effort, said Abhay Singhal, founder and chief revenue officer at In-Mobi, which in the past year had drawn up a slew of initiatives to ease gender bias in workforce.